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While company vice president Mike McNamara marks patterns onto material with a black sharpie, workers elsewhere on the production floor at McKenney Custom Sports hunch over sewing machines, stitching together an almost-finished product.

And if the maker of equipment for goaltenders feels a little like a tailor shop, it’s not a coincidence. That’s how the outfit functions in the ultra-competitive hockey equipment industry – custom-making high-quality gear and occupying a niche mass-market competitors struggle to service.

But guarding and growing that slice of the market is a challenge.

Making McKenney’s equipment eligible for use in the NHL would require paying the league a licensing fee of at least $75,000, and signing up pros to endorse the gear would cost still more.

The company, which employs 15 people at its headquarters in northeast Scarborough, is left balancing the need for broader exposure with the steep cost of achieving it.

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“When companies try to compete against the big boys, that’s been their downfall,” McKenney says. “You can produce volume and not make money, or you can be very specialized and still make money.”

McKenney and McNamara founded the company in 1997 after leaving their jobs at Louisville TPS, the hockey arm of baseball equipment maker Louisville Slugger. At its peak, McKenney Custom Sports employed 30 people.

Their small facility produces equipment for hockey and lacrosse goaltenders, and turns out, among other products, about 1,000 pairs of hockey goalie pads annually, selling online and through a network of retailers.

“It’s really well made and well priced, but it’s a limited market,” says Joel Majer, owner of the independent hockey retailer Majer Hockey,. “Canadian Tire doesn’t buy from the small guy. Bigger gets bigger. But I hope he’s around. I think there’s a need for it because not everybody is comfortable shopping in a big-box store.”

While McKenney’s company lacks the widespread reach his corporate competitors enjoy, he counters with customization and economy.

The company’s website allows customers to order equipment to precise size and colour specifications, and because he doesn’t write cheques for NHL licensing and pro player endorsement McKenney says he doesn’t have to pass those costs to consumers.

So where a bigger-named company would sell pro-calibre goalie pads for $1,500 a pair, McKenney says his version would offer the same quality for $1,000.

“If you compete outside (the NHL) you don’t have all those costs,” McKenney says. “I joke that we’re the President’s Choice of goalie equipment.”

But McKenney says the same forces that reshaped the broader economy had a profound effect on small and mid-sized hockey equipment manufacturers.

While a strong dollar has stabilized expenses for Canadian NHL teams and helped bring the Jets back to Winnipeg, McKenney says U.S. orders fell as the value of the dollar rose. That drop-off in business forced the company to trim its workforce before settling on its current size.

Meanwhile, the past decade has seen hockey equipment giants take out many of the mid-sized companies that once competed in the space.

In 2004 Reebok bought CCM, preserving the brand but bringing that company’s hockey products under its banner. And since 2008 Bauer has acquired a string of smaller manufacturers, including California-based visor maker Mission-Itech.

The result, McKenney says, is a hockey equipment business that lacks a middle class, leaving boutique outfits like his to compete with industry giants who can cut costs on many products by manufacturing them overseas, and can use NHL exposure to reach consumers worldwide.

But this doesn’t mean McKenney is completely shut out of the NHL.

Occasionally, he says, a larger company with an NHL client will need a specialized product quickly, and will subcontract it to McKenney’s firm.

“We’re not a big-volume company and we don’t need to be,” he says. “If you really want custom, we’re still a custom house. And a lot of people still believe in a Canadian-made product.”

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